Tom Morris of St Andrews, page 7
Tom’s renown on the Links grew by the year and, by the time of the big match in 1849 when Allan and Tom took on the Dunn twins in the marathon match watched by thousands in St Andrews, Musselburgh and North Berwick, his place in the game was assured. The coming of the gutta ball may have caused some anxiety for a while, but Tom would have been well advised and quick to see the opportunities it presented.
There is a reasonable amount of evidence that Tom started ball-making on his own account around 1848. If he did, he would not only have made the old style feathery but also the new revolutionary gutta percha ball. Tom certainly had room enough and all of the facilities necessary to make balls in his house in Pilmour Links. He was independent and sufficiently well off to present balls for prizes to the Mechanics Golf Club and it is at least interesting that his brother George was a recipient of the prizes, as were Andrew Strath and Bob Kirk, other recognised players of the day.
The initial blissful years of Tom and Nancy’s life together did not last long. On 17 April 1850 their four-year-old son Tommy died and was buried two days later in the Cathedral Cemetery beside his grandparents, John and Jean. This was a terrible blow to Tom and Nancy, for although infant mortality was high, by the age of four they must have felt confident that their boy was through the dangerous and difficult years. The bereavement that they suffered at this early stage in their married life must have contributed to the great fortitude they would show for the rest of their lives.
Distress at the loss may have ignited their determination to move and make a new life for themselves elsewhere, although there were doubtless other factors. Willie Dunn was about to leave his native Musselburgh to become Keeper of the Green and Professional at Blackheath in London. Tom may have also started to feel that living in Allan Robertson’s shadow was restrictive and not all that it might be. Although independent in business he was nevertheless at risk with the vagaries of play on the Links. Others were taking up gutta ball-making and he must have viewed the future with some uncertainty. The Scots population as a whole had become more mobile and alert to the possibilities of self-improvement.
With constant talk of much-travelled and prosperous men on the Links, it would be surprising if Tom and Nancy had not given some thought to improving their own position. The coming of the railway to Leuchars and the North British Railway establishing the world’s first train ferry, across the Firth of Forth between Burntisland and Granton, had broadened the horizons of many in St Andrews. Edinburgh, Glasgow and even London were suddenly easily accessible. Scotland was on the move and self-improvement was being preached from the pulpit as well as talked about in the street.
Major Fairlie had intimated to Tom that gentlemen in the vicinity of Ayr were of a mind to expand their rudimentary course at Prestwick and have it properly established, developed and maintained. Tom and Nancy must have talked through the possibilities and the enthusiasm and support of Fairlie would have been crucial. Nancy was pregnant again and would give birth in May. It would be propitious for them to move to Prestwick in the summer of 1851 in order to make a new life for themselves and their new baby.
But before they did and just before Willie Dunn himself departed for Blackheath, Dunn’s Musselburgh backers challenged Tom to a match over the Links of St Andrews. Particular interest was attached to it, not only because of the large wagers riding on the outcome, but also because both contestants were about to leave their native towns for pastures new. The odds were clearly on Tom and when he was unexpectedly beaten, the Montrose Standard of May 1851 lamented:
Tom’s performance at the outset was inauspicious . . .
At the last hole Tom’s ball rolled first down the east side and then over the west. Seeing that he could not halve the match Tom gave his ball a kick in disgust while Dunn took a snuff with great gusto.
Tom had much on his mind. Not only was there the new baby in the house as well as his sister-in-law Margaret Bayne, but also all of the work pressures of a self-employed man. With his departure for Prestwick imminent, it is not surprising that from time to time he gave vent to his emotions.
Emulating Allan Robertson, Tom started a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings just before he left St Andrews for Prestwick: it is interesting to note that his first cutting, dated October 1850, was an account of his patron, J.O. Fairlie, being installed as Captain of The Royal and Ancient. His second was the full newspaper account of his defeat by Willie Dunn in May 1851, which also reported that: ‘Tom departs from St Andrews for Ayrshire in the end of this month, to a place in the vicinity of Ayr, called Prestwick, where they have links, and upon which Tom will likely soon astonish the natives of those parts; he will no doubt reign supreme as a golfer.’
The Reverend A.K.H. Boyd christened Tommy Morris in the Holy Trinity Kirk of St Andrews on the 10 May 1851. By the end of July the family was settled into their new home in Prestwick. Tommy’s arrival, both in St Andrews and Prestwick, heralded a new era for golf in more ways than anybody at the time could have imagined.
8 Sowing Seeds in the West
As the Great Exhibition of 1851 was being held at London’s Crystal Palace, Tom Morris was moving his family from St Andrews to the west coast of Scotland. Today Prestwick is no more than a three-hour drive by car from St Andrews. In 1851 it must have seemed to Nancy and her friends an entire world away. Tom may well already have visited at the invitation of the newly promoted Colonel Fairlie and his friends to have a look at what might be done with the place, for the coming of the railways had rendered such relatively distant places accessible.1 A pregnant Nancy, however, is not likely to have made any preliminary trip there and surely would have required some reassurance from Tom that they would have a house and home and that there was a good life and future to be made for them in Prestwick.
With a two-month-old child and all of the goods and chattels necessary to set up a house, their move to Prestwick could not have been easy. As well as the tools of his trade, his own clubs sewn up in coarse linen, there would also be the equipment necessary for Tom to make and repair clubs as well as the materials to make balls.
They would need transport to Leuchars Junction station early in the morning.2 This would have been straightforward enough for there were many carters known to them in the Town; it was nevertheless at least a one-hour journey by horse and cart. Then there was the train to Burntisland, after everything was loaded into the guard’svan and Nancy and her baby installed in a carriage. This may well have been Nancy’s first train journey and the thought of feeding her baby and keeping it clean during the hours of travelling must have weighed heavily upon her.
At Burntisland they would have had to move everything into the new train ferry to make the crossing to Granton, where it would all have to be loaded back on to the train for the short run into Edinburgh’s North Bridge Station. A conservative estimate of the time for the journey from St Andrews to Edinburgh based upon the railway timetables of the day would be about four hours.
At Edinburgh another train had to be boarded for Glasgow where it was necessary to change stations. This required a handcart at least, but there were carters plying their trade between the stations. From Glasgow to the Prestwick Station on the line to Ayr is a journey of only thirty miles. If they reached Prestwick eight hours after leaving North Street in St Andrews it would have been due to the fortuity of connecting train times. No matter how long it took to make the journey, Nancy must have thought it interminable and have been exhausted by the experience.
In Prestwick the walk from the station to the house that had been secured for them up at the Town Cross is some three hundred yards. Given the probable late hour of their arrival, it is most likely that arrangements had been made for them to spend their first night in a room at the Red Lion Inn across the road. But even if arrangements had not been made, one can be sure that the Hunter family of the Red Lion would have been over the road to offer them a bed for the night.
Prestwick is spread along the road to Ayr and in 1851 was a village with a population of two thousand. It extends today from the village parish of Monkton in the north and straddles what was then the main turnpike road to the busy township of Ayr to the south. A long, continuous shingle beach edges the Atlantic Ocean parallel to the road, on the other side of which lies the fertile farmland that supplied Glasgow with its kale, cabbages, meal and milk.
The focal centre of the Prestwick township is the Cross. In 1851 it was a market cross, set in an open area where three roads converged in a cluster of dwellings and shops. The Burgh Hall and the Red Lion Inn were the principal buildings about the Cross.
The railway line runs along the sea-side of the road to Ayr. The station at Prestwick is sited just below the Cross, some three hundred yards down the Wrack Road, so called because it was the road used by the farmers to cart the wrack, the seaweed, from the beach to fertilise their fields.
Beyond the railway, the links land sweeps down to the beach. In 1851 this land spread almost as far as the eye could see all the way south to Ayr and up to Troon in the north. The piece of land that had been secured for Prestwick Golf Course was bordered on the south side by the Wrack Road and to the north by the Pow Burn. To the west lay the sea, edged by a strip of silver sand and to the east the railway line separated the links from the village.
The home obtained for Tom and his family was close to the Cross, on the side of the busy Ayr road. It was not a large house, comprising only two rooms. To the rear was a living room with two boxed-in beds. The front room with its door onto the street was to be Tom’s workshop with an area designated for storing the gentlemen’s clubs. The house was not spacious and it was not grand, but it was no better or worse than what they had left in St Andrews and doubtless neither more nor less than Tom and Nancy had expected it to be.
On one side of their new house was Mr Hutchison’s shop. Hutchison was a silk weaver who ran the general store that served much of the local needs. On the other side was Mr Wiseman, a wine and spirit merchant. Opposite, across the busy High Street and main road to Ayr, stood the Red Lion.
The inn stands to this day and from the outside, at least, has changed little. It was at one time a stopping place for the Ayr to Glasgow stagecoach and was then, after the coming of the railway in 1843, the hostelry that boarded travellers and served as the ‘howf’ for the local worthies. It would come to be the watering place and the ‘nineteenth hole’ of all the Prestwick golfers.
In 1851 the Red Lion was owned and run by the Hunters, a family that would come to play a central part in the lives of the Morris family through friendship and marriage. The Hunters would also come to play a key role in developing and expanding golf in Prestwick. William Hunter, ‘mine host’ of the Red Lion, was some fourteen years older than Tom. He farmed fifteen acres of land on the Monkton side of the parish to the south, as well as running the busy inn with his wife Elizabeth Gray, aged thirty-eight, and their four children.
William Hunter came from a large local family. His sister Mary Hunter, aged thirty-two and a spinster, worked in the inn and his brother James farmed twenty-five acres of land about half a mile up the road towards Ayr. In Ayr itself, William had two cousins in business. One was a timber merchant and it was this business which was ultimately to be the catalyst that created the Morris family fortune; the other cousin was Dean of Guild in the town. William’s widowed sister-in law Jane, would come to live only a few yards along the road with her daughter Mary, a dressmaker, and her 22-year-old son Charlie Hunter, then a clerk in Boswell’s law office and later in the Customs and Excise.
Tom Morris did not go to Prestwick to start the game in the West of Scotland; golf had been played there sporadically for some three hundred years. There had been a golf club in Glasgow in the early nineteenth century that played on Glasgow Green by the side of the river Clyde. The earliest records of the Glasgow Golf Club date from 1787 but it seems to have faltered somewhat from 1794 to 1809 when it again had a burst of activity. By 1835 however, it was once more in abeyance and it was not to be until some thirty-five years later that the Club was reconstituted. At this time, as James Colville in his History of the Glasgow Golf Club, points out, ‘The well-to-do were finding ease and ostentation in setting up country houses, in building and planting, and in field sport. The old pastimes of city life were more left to the “wee corks” and merchants in a sma’ way.’
Golf had been played at Prestwick in one form or another since at least the end of the eighteenth century and there is solid evidence, contained in The History of the Kennedys, that the game was played in Ayr in the sixteenth century. In the early eighteenth century, Macfarlane’s Geographical Collections also relates that there were ‘. . . pleasant greens to the east and west where hare courses were run and golf playing and other amusements practiced on the town’s lands.’
A recent discovery of a letter in the Kennedy family archives reveals that the local land owning gentry of Ayrshire played golf at least on a fortnightly basis in 1751. Like other loose golfing fraternities of the time, this apparently regular meeting would have long fallen by the wayside. With no records surviving, we can have no knowledge of how long play continued, but it is safe to assume that some of the golfing diehards of Girvan would have persisted into the nineteenth century.
Tom would find that, as with the local people of St Andrews, New Year’s Day was the main day of the year for competition play amongst the artisan classes, but on many a good day in the winter there would be a game to be seen out on the links. Unlike St Andrews, however, there was no set course at Prestwick. A party of players would simply cut a number of holes and play without formality over any part of the links land.
The gentlemen players were determined that all of this should change, and Tom was charged with the laying out of a course, while they would form a Prestwick Golf Club along the lines of the established clubs in the east. It was not just the gentlemen players of Ayrshire, however, who wanted to see Prestwick links formed for regular play. There were also the ordinary local men from Prestwick and Ayr who were quick to support the laying out of a proper golf course on the links.
It is not surprising that Prestwick, only a short train journey from Glasgow, should become a centre for what Colville calls ‘the “Tory Lairds”, retired “nabobs” and planters, successful lawyers – and a very few “Moderate” clericals’, people, in fact, not dissimilar from those that Tom had served in St Andrews and who were also to be found on the links of Aberdeen, Montrose, Musselburgh and North Berwick.
Contemporary writers or friends did not record Tom’s first impressions of Prestwick and its links. It must have been a sobering experience for him to find himself alone on the Prestwick links land after the bustle of activity on the Links at St Andrews. He would surely have reflected on his friends and the farewell dinner that they had given him in the Cross Keys Hotel in St Andrews before he left. He must have also thought of the great matches that he had enjoyed with the gentlemen of The Royal and Ancient, for they had been many and rewarding that summer. The Earl and Countess of Eglinton had been at the dinner and would doubtless have been introduced to Tom and wished him well in his efforts on the links at Prestwick. The Earl, as Allan Robertson would have said, was, ‘less of a player than a tryer’, but nevertheless he was a great patron of the game, enjoying his golf at North Berwick as well as at St Andrews.
On 2 July 1851 the Prestwick Golf club was founded, and Tom was officially the Club’s servant and greenkeeper. Everything had been organised in advance by the indefatigable Fairlie and his cohorts. The links had been leased from the Town Council as well as from the twelve Freemen with rights to the land. Special arrangements for play were made for the local artisan players, who were also permitted to use the facilities of Tom’s workshop as a repository for their clubs. The two distinct groups of players, the gentlemen and artisans, were however, never likely to remain in mutual accord. The traditions of St Andrews, where the gentlemen and the townspeople’s interests ran in parallel, were alien to the west. Deference and self-interest were soon in conflict and it must have been a trying time for Tom when altercations between the two groups occurred.
Tom was instrumental in starting a separate club for the tradesmen and artisans of the district, less than six months after his arrival in Prestwick. Prestwick Mechanics Golf Club was formed in November 1851 with twenty-eight founding members, somewhat fewer than its senior, the Prestwick Golf Club, and about half the number of the Mechanics Club in St Andrews. From the outset, however, it was a vigorous and enthusiastic institution.
A solution was soon found to the latent friction between the two clubs when Mr Hutchison, the grocer next door to Tom, provided a room at the back of his shop for the members of the Mechanics Club to store their golfing gear. Their social facilities were also improved when they were allowed to put up a shed on the links to dispense refreshments between rounds. Within two years, the Mechanics was a well-established club with a membership from beyond Ayr and its environs as far afield as Glasgow. Some of them, like the Doleman brothers whose origins were in Musselburgh, were outstanding players with a ‘bob or two’ to back themselves.
Reading the Founding Member’s list of the Prestwick Golf Club, however, is like reading a selection from the lists of The Royal and Ancient, the Burgess Club, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and that of North Berwick put together. These men were interrelated through marriage and common interests. Some were brother officers in the British Army and in particular from the regiments serving in India. They were landowners, men of property and wealth, with sporting interests that extended beyond golf and they were spread like couch grass across the links lands of Scotland.
